Research in the Cameron lab aims to understand the origin and evolution of animal body plan diversity. Aquatic environments, and especially the oceans, are home to the bulk of global animal diversity, and nowhere are body plans more divergent than among the invertebrates. This biodiversity is a result of the interplay between evolution, development and ecology. For this reason our research program uses a multidisciplinary approach including organismal and molecular biology, development, phylogenetics, informatics, fluid mechanics, taxonomy and paleontology. We are broadly interested in the evolution of animal biodiversity, and the deuterostomes, that evolutionary linage that includes hemichordates, echinoderms and our own phylum, the chordates, is where we make our greatest contributions.